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taste map: synaesthesia and the tube

James Wannerton, head of the UK Synaesthesia Association, has completed his nearly 50 year project to map the London Tube: by its tastes. Wannerton has experienced lifelong synaesthesia—an involuntary union of two or more senses that are ordinarily experienced discretely. For Wannerton, this means “lexical synaesthesia”: for him, a consistent association with specific tastes that accompany the words at individual tube stops.

Abler was run by Sara Hendren between 2009 and 2017. I tracked and commented on art, adaptive technologies and prosthetics, the future of human bodies in the built environment, and related ideas.

It was a time when discussions on the web weren't yet entirely dominated by social media, and it was an exciting moment to be blogging—putting together unlikely bedfellows next to one another, magazine-style, to see what sense could be made by thinking aloud, together. I was writing about prosthetics in the ordinary sense, but also about assistive technologies in the far less ordinary sense: low tech tools, hybrid technologies, art works, and more. The ideas were associatively connected, restless with questions. And all of it, in retrospect, was a platform, a runway for me to write myself into a mode of working as a design researcher and artist.

You can see some of my current and ongoing projects—making, writing, speaking, and even, yes, still blogging—here.

I tweet. You can use this site by going straight to the archives for past posts, or you can use the guide here on the home page.